When Elon Musk unveiled Dragon v2 last year, we got our first truly good look at what SpaceX's crew vehicle is like. Apart from the ability to propulsively land, one of the big changes was the lack of ...

According to many news articles, the crash of the Falcon 9 during landing on 1/10/2015 was due to running out of hydraulic fluid for the steerable hypersonic grid fins. This was seemingly confirmed ...

According to what I've read, SpaceX tried to use parachutes to recover the first stage of the Falcon 9, but it did not survive reentry.
Now they plan to use 2 separate rocket burns to land:
Reentry ...

If SpaceX's plan to land the CRS-5 first stage on their Autonomous Spaceport Drone Ship goes perfectly, there will be a 50 (ish) meter rocket on a barge in the Atlantic. Leaving aside the interesting ...

It sounds from the text of this tweet like Elon Musk plans to continue to do barge landings over the long term:
"Base is 300 ft by 100 ft, with wings that extend width to 170 ft. Will allow refuel &...

A significant minority of the users over at the /r/SpaceX Reddit community seem to be of the opinion that SpaceX will attempt to reuse the Falcon 9 CRS-5 first stage provided it lands on the downrange ...

After the SpaceX CRS-4 launch of Dragon on F9, Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX head of launch operations is quoted as saying:
Koenigsmann said that shorter gaps between launches should become more routine ...

The Saturn V had 5 engines (F-1) on the first stage, five engines on the second stage (J-2). The N-1 had 30 engines on its first stage (NK-15).
The Falcon 9 (1.0 and 1.1) have 9 Merlin 1 engines on ...

SpaceX's attempt at a reusable first stage rocket sounds amazing, but how they're going to get it to land back on the launchpad is beyond me. Assuming that the first stage will separate with a speed ...

On the SpaceX launch site (slc-40 launch pad) there are lot of cables suspended around top of the rocket (between four white rods). What is the function of them? Why no such cables is used on other ...

One way to create a heavy launch vehicle is by clustering large numbers of small engines together in a stage. An example of this approach is the SpaceX Falcon 9:
Now I've heard people arguing against ...

My son really was upset he missed the launch live, so we re-watched the video at breakfast and I noticed starting at 3:27 in the video a few seconds after MECO, and stage separation, you can see the ...

Based on the aborted launch on Thanksgiving 2013 of the first Falcon 9 v1.1 from Florida, we know that an issue occurred where oxygen got into the ground based TEA-TEB sources.
I understand that TEA-...

During yesterday's aborted SpaceX launch, someone was giving instructions to the controllers about abort procedures:
To abort the launch, a controller will say 'abort, abort, abort'.... controllers ...

With the launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 V1.1 Nov 25th (Assuming it succeeds), it will apparently be the first US Commercial launch (I assume to GEO, since Orbital, with all the commercial small sats ...

They are reporting that the three engine relight in the upper atmosphere worked. But the relight of a single engine, lower down for pretend landing on the water generated too much torque and the fuel (...